High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

the corner of my eye. Great bird spreading its wings. (I believe it was a man. I am sure it was a man. But even that fact, I can’t be one hundred percent certain of.) At the Fourteenth Street station. My plan was to take the uptown to Fifty-seventh Street. Past Times Square. I’d been disappointed in Times Square lately. The area around Carnegie Hall is very different. Lorelei would be more visible there. Now standing at the edge of the platform a little apart from a small crowd gathered for the next train. A few yards maybe. I didn’t believe that I was standing dangerously close to the edge. Something on the sole of my high-heeled sandal, something sticky and disgusting like a large wad of gum. And this gum was like a tongue. Ugh! Trying to scrape it off my shoe when I saw, or half-saw, your shadow in the corner of my eye, advancing upon me from the left. The thought came to me swift and yearning Please touch me because it was such a familiar thought, I did not believe that I was in danger. Touch me even if you hurt me. Oh please.
    Then I was falling. I was screaming, and I was falling. It happened so fast! Faster than I can recount. Though even then thinking You touched me at last. It was a human touch. You chose me because I am beautiful and desirable and young. You chose me over all the others.
    But already my happiness has ended. I have fallen onto the track. I have fallen helpless, on my back. A smell of oil in my widened nostrils, something musty and cold. Out of nowhere the train is speeding. Oncoming headlights. My body is a boneless rag doll flopping and being crushed by the train. The emergency brakes are thrown but it’s too late, it was too late as soon as you moved up stealthily behind me smiling whispering Lorelei! Lorelei! in your way of cruel teasing. You pushed me from behind, hard. Swift and hard the palms of your hands flat against my back between my shoulder blades. As if you’ve planned the act, you’ve rehearsed the act numerous times to perfection, and in the very act of pushing you are turning aside, to the left, taking care that the momentum of your act doesn’t carry you over the edge of the platform and onto the track below with your screaming victim. And you are running, you are pushing past bystanders running and gone with your mysterious cruel smile as below the platform on the tracks inside the terrible grinding wheels my body is caught up, my legs severed at the knees, a wrenching of bone, my left arm is torn off at the shoulder, my skull crushed as you’d crush a bird’s egg beneath your careless feet, scarcely knowing you’d crushed it. The silly high-heeled sandals have been tossed from my feet and will be found a dozen yards away. My blood is rushing from my body to congeal with the cold oil and filth of the tracks. My body is crushed, disfigured. You would no longer stare at my beauty. You would no longer recognize Lorelei. On the platform above, strangers are screaming. I want to cry, these strangers care for me. In that instant, they care for me. Fellow passengers who’d disapproved of me in the trains have now forgiven me and are crying Help! Get help! Oh God get help! A tall husky girl who might be Plastic Girl runs to the edge of the platform, can’t see me because my body is hidden by the train skidding to a stop.
    And Dunk, slack-mouthed in horror. Dunk with his bald-hippie pigtail gone gray. Dunk stunned and sick with grief he has lost me for the final time.
    And you others who never knew me except to glimpse a girl pushed in front of a speeding train to her death, these others grieving for me, too. Never knew me in life but will never never forget me as I am in death.
    Please love me? My eyes beg. Glancing at the window beside your seat, uptown train flying through the tunnel, lights in the car flickering off, back on, off again and back on like the sensation before sleep. Lights in the car so bright you can’t see outside,